UAE Oil Minister: Too Early To Say If OPEC Deal Should Be Extended

January 12, 2017/ 07:10

Washington. It is still too early to say if the oil supply deal should be extended beyond its original six-month period at the end of the first half this year, the oil minister of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) said on Wednesday.

After OPEC and 11 non-OPEC producers decided to cut supply by almost 1.8 million bpd to prop up prices and speed up the oil market rebalancing, Suhail bin Mohammed al-Mazroui, the oil minister of OPEC’s no.4 largest producer, said that the oil market needs competition, Reuters reports, quoting the minister as speaking at an oil industry conference.

“We are not a cartel. We are not targeting a price,” Mazroui said, as quoted by Reuters.

According to the minister, oil prices at US$50 would be fair for some producers and unfair for others.

Regarding the thorny issue of compliance to the supply deal, and asked if oil producers would continue to honor the agreement if oil prices increased, the UAE minister said that they were not doing it “purely for the price”, but also for “the sustainability of the industry”.

Uranium is on the edge of becoming one of the world’s hottest commodities once again, and this is a once-in-25-year event. This small company could be on the verge of a huge breakout.

Under the OPEC deal from November 30, UAE pledged to cut 139,000 bpd from a reference production level of 3.013 million bpd, and its Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) signaled as early as in mid-December that it would comply with the cuts.

Referring to a possible extension of the deal, Al-Fezaia said to Bloomberg: “Extension of the current deal or additional cuts depends on conditions in the oil market, the recovery of prices and reduction of the oversupply.”